So the post-war period was also a little different psychologically. So then the population exchange was done here, which is still a topic that is still being discussed in Hungary. That means it was mainly handled by Okáli, and also Husák to some extent. Okáli was the Commissioner of the Interior. The Hungarians who lived around Békešská Čaba, that is, the Slovaks who lived around Békešská Čaba and there, they convinced them that they should return to their old homeland and from there they deported the Hungarians to Hungary. From there. And at that time it was dangerous to be a Hungarian, because anyone was called a collaborator and I don't know what, a fascist and so on. Also for reasons such as property. So the Slovaks who came here from Hungary had to be given something. And they gave them property. So, the wealthy were selected from them on this principle and they were essentially deported to Hungary. Well, back then, this could be done through so-called reslovakization. And that reslovakization meant that a Hungarian could also register, as long as he could research some traces of his origin somewhere and find out, so basically he simply became a Slovak. And in this way, my father went to Nitra and Krupina and there they gave confirmation that he was of Slovak origin, and therefore actually that nationality, I also have a birth certificate from that year 1948 and it says Žilka with a soft palate, Tibor and so on, Slovak nationality. So that way we were basically pure Slovaks. And so this was not affected at all, so they could not deport us to Hungary. But that is an interesting history. There is a lot of professional literature about that in Hungary, of course.
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There was a certain Roman Jakobson, a prominent linguist and literary scholar, and so on, truly prominent, he is a great personality. Of Jewish origin, but a Russian, who came to Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and then stayed here in Czechoslovakia and was one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle and one of the main representatives of that linguistic circle. And then he actually emigrated, since he was both a Jew and a Russian, a Russian Jew, in the 1938th year, I think, to Sweden, then from there to the United States. But in those years he was perhaps the most significant personality in scientific life. Well, he was supposed to come to us. We had that cabinet and we were doing information theory and, based on that, communication theory mainly. And Anton Popovič prepared all of that, because he received an honorary doctorate in Bratislava. He received it first in Prague, then in Brno, then also in Bratislava and he was in Bratislava and spent a few days there. Well, he got this doctorate and Popovič was an excellent organizer, he met him and invited him to Nitra, that this and that. Jakobson liked it, he thought it was an interesting experiment and he was supposed to come. And Miko, who was our leader, he already had a plane ticket (he lived in Košice), and he was supposed to travel to Bratislava, from there to Nitra and we were supposed to meet Jakobson here. Everything was ready and so on. And finally, the Russian invasion came, that is, the Soviets, and it simply didn't happen.
And in the 80s, I didn't expect such a change to happen at all. It was so hard. It was loosening up, when I remember now, the situation was different. And I also had a certain problem then. In 83, 84, it could have been that I wrote an article "Southern Color in Slovak Prose" and Andruška published it (you know Andruška). He was the deputy editor-in-chief in Slovenské pohľady and they published it. And there was about Ballek, I then lectured on that continuously until 1989. And Andruška was also there, basically. Habaj, Andruška and Ballek as the biggest personality of the three. So it was the southern color, so they described southern Slovakia. And there was some ideological one - it was called Aktív, I think, and there Pezlár, he was the ideological secretary, he also participated. And there was already a problem in that counter-revolutionaries, revisionists, opportunists were raising their heads again, writing such and such articles. And then Okáli, a Davisite, came out and cited me as an example of that. In his speech, in which he did not mention my name, he left out my name, but he precisely stated that he had written this and that, that nothing like that, that the southern color. He was quite nationally based, because he organized the population exchange. And then he came out and Pezlár agreed to it, so I got into this situation. We ironed that out later with Ballek and Čižmárik. Čižmárik was a poet and at the same time he was the head of the Cultural Section, that's what it was called, in Pravda. And Ballek also knew, he was basically an official, in those years he was the director of the Literary Fund, so I went to him, I explained what had happened. He knew about it, of course. Well, we went for a beer, there was one such pub in those days. It wasn't like now, where you could choose. It was such a famous place, good Pilsen beer, we went there and the three of us discussed it, Čižmárik, Ballek and I. Well, we agreed that I would write a big article about Soviet literature.
Prof. PhDr. Tibor Žilka, DrSc. was born on January 29, 1939 in the village of Plášťovce on the Slovak-Hungarian border, which became part of Hungary after the Vienna Arbitration. His mother managed to arrange for his father to be released from the war, so he did not have to go to the front, they stayed together in the village of Vámosmikola and his father worked for the Jew Földes. Towards the end of the war they moved to Šia, where his father started trading with the Jew Rosenberg shortly after the war. After his departure to Israel, he and his mother bought a sawmill and it provided them with a livelihood, but after 1948 they could not continue doing so. Because of their Hungarian origin, they were threatened with displacement to Hungary. They were saved by re-Slovakization and the genesis of their father’s family, which extends to central Slovakia, to Detva and Krupina. Tibor Žilka started a Slovak primary school, but due to his insufficient knowledge of Slovak, he had to repeat the first year. After eight years, he decided to continue at a Hungarian school. In 1957, he began studying Hungarian at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. After completing his fourth year of state studies, a year before defending his diploma thesis, he started working at the Pedagogical Institute in Nitra. At that time, the Cabinet of Literary Communication was being established in Nitra, and he was one of the founders. During his compulsory military service, he met his future wife Marta, and after their marriage in 1965, they had two sons, Róbert (1968) and Norbert (1973). In the 1980s, he got into trouble over a published article, but with the help of Ballek and Čižmárik, he managed to resolve it. In 1990, he became vice-dean of the Faculty of Education in Nitra, and from 1992 he worked simultaneously at a university in Slovakia and Hungary (Budapest, later Pilišská Čaba). Since 2009, he has worked only in Slovakia, at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra. He retired in 2020, but is still active in literary studies.
